Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting BGP hijacking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other
flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Attackers can easily use it to harvest bitcoins
( ) Peering Agreements and other legitimate BGP uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy who performed the hijack or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop BGP hijacking for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Network Admins use firewalls to inject BGP routes
( ) It won't support IPv6
( ) Network Admins will not put up with it
(x) Cisco will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many Network Admins cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Hijackers don't care about invalid prefixes in their routers
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for which ASNs owns which prefixes
(x) Poor BGP Import/Export Policies by IX's and peers
(x) Authoritarian Governments
( ) Ease of searching for ASNs of high value targets
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing investment in ancient routers, IOS versions
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than BGP to attack
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of BGP hijacking
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with BGP hijackers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of hijackers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) IOS
(x) Fortinet
(x) Mikrotik
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) BGP routing policy should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to peer freely without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Peering should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your ASN?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at http://packetpushers.net- now the largest networking podcast on the Internet.